Product Details
- An MVD Exclusive
- SKU: JSP77186
- Format: CD
- UPC: 788065718626
- Street Date: 09/04/15
- PreBook Date: 01/01/01
- Label: JSP Records »
- Genre: Folk
- Run Time: mins
- Number of Discs: 4
- Year of Production: 2015
- Box Lot: 6
- Territory: NORTH AMERICA
Product Assets
Clarence Ashley - Country Music Pioneer: 1927-1935
A True American Original
- List Price: $28.99
- Your Price: $28.99
- In Stock: [{"available":"0"}]
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This collection documents the work of a master performer, who travelled widely, obsessively collecting material wherever he could. It's an essential record of a culture so changed as to be almost unrecognisable. His background was in medicine shows. By the age of sixteen he had joined one as a musician and as a 'warm-up' comedian. Clarence Ashley initially recorded in the 1920s. His last pre-war recordings were made in the early 1930s and he would not record again until the folk revival of the 1960s. As the 1930s wore on, he continued in music, a medicine show regular, sometimes in the company of Roy Acuff. He also worked with the likes of Charlie Monroe and the Stanley Brothers. The songs he collected all his life eventually comprised a vast repertoire. Two songs often associated with him are The Coo Coo Bird and The House Carpenter. There are many recordings of Coo Coo, but somehow Clarence Ashley's performance is seen as definitive. The House Carpenter has English origins, but many of his famous performances, like Rising Sun Blues are out-and-out American. Another of his collected songs, Old John Hardy, he learned from a Mrs Ellie Johnson in 1916. John Hardy was executed in January 1894 for killing a man in a crap game for twenty-five cents. In total, this is a selection of some of the finest examples of old time music cut in the genre's golden era.
